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A Severed Head

Author : Iris Murdoch

Publisher : Penguin

Page : 199 pages

File Size : 50,66 MB

Release : 1976-11-18

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1101495839

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Book Description

A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.” A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.



Severed

Author : Frances Larson

Publisher : Granta Books

Page : 200 pages

File Size : 30,85 MB

Release : 2014-11-06

Category : History

ISBN : 1847088015

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Book Description

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.



The Severed Head

Author : Julia Kristeva

Publisher : Columbia University Press

Page : 208 pages

File Size : 14,90 MB

Release : 2012

Category : Art

ISBN : 0231157207

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Book Description

Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.



The Beginning of Everything

Author : Robyn Schneider

Publisher : Harper Collins

Page : 222 pages

File Size : 40,62 MB

Release : 2013-08-27

Category : Young Adult Fiction

ISBN : 0062217151

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Book Description

Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything is a witty and heart-wrenching teen novel that will appeal to fans of books by John Green and Ned Vizzini, novels such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and classics like The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. Varsity tennis captain Ezra Faulkner was supposed to be homecoming king, but that was before—before his girlfriend cheated on him, before a car accident shattered his leg, and before he fell in love with unpredictable new girl Cassidy Thorpe. As Kirkus said in a starred review, "Schneider takes familiar stereotypes and infuses them with plenty of depth. Here are teens who could easily trade barbs and double entendres with the characters that fill John Green's novels." Funny, smart, and including everything from flash mobs to blanket forts to a poodle who just might be the reincarnation of Jay Gatsby, The Beginning of Everything is a refreshing contemporary twist on the classic coming-of-age novel—a heart-wrenching story about how difficult it is to play the part that people expect, and how new beginnings can stem from abrupt and tragic endings.



The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue

Author : Patricia Palmer

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 197 pages

File Size : 28,25 MB

Release : 2014

Category : History

ISBN : 1107041848

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Book Description

This book explores actual and literary depictions of beheadings in sixteenth-century Ireland and addresses how violence is transcribed into art.



Severed Heads, Broken Hearts

Author : Robyn Schneider

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 259 pages

File Size : 32,22 MB

Release : 2013-08-15

Category : Juvenile Fiction

ISBN : 147111547X

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Book Description

Perfect for fans of John Green, Nicola Yoon and Gayle Forman. If you've managed to survive disaster, what happens when it strikes again? Ezra Faulkner believes everyone has a tragedy waiting for them - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. His own tragedy waited until he had everything to lose. In one night, a reckless driver shatters Ezra's knee, his athletic career, and his perfect life. No longer part of the popular crowd, Ezra finds himself at the table of misfits, where he encounters Cassidy Thorpe. Intelligent, effortless and wonderfully weird, she is unlike anyone Ezra's ever met before. Together they discover flash mobs, buried treasure, secret movie screenings and a poodle with a questionable history. But as Ezra dives into new friendships and new love, he is forced to ask: if you've managed to survive disaster, what happens when it strikes again? "Maybe it's time to expand your list of literary crushes to include someone other than Augustus Waters." MTV.com "I couldn't help but think of John Green's novels - I think his fans will eat this up." Publishers Weekly "Heartbreaking and hilarious. I have no doubt that girls everywhere are going to fall madly, deeply, hopelessly in love with Ezra Faulkner." Sarah Mlynowski, NYT bestselling author. "This is one of the most literary teen books I've read for a long time - up there with John Green - and it's a delight to read… the ending absolutely blew me away, being unpredictable, powerful, and altogether fantastic." The Bookbag Severed Heads, Broken Hearts is a lyrical, witty and heart-wrenching novel about how difficult it is to play the part that people expect, and how new beginnings can stem from abrupt and tragic endings.



Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

Author : Frances Larson

Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company

Page : 253 pages

File Size : 25,65 MB

Release : 2014-11-17

Category : History

ISBN : 0871404958

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Book Description

A “wide-ranging and thoughtful” (Wall Street Journal) exploration of the varied obsessions that the “civilized West” has had with decapitated heads and skulls. The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.



Severed Heads and Martyred Souls

Author : Laura Poulosky

Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Page : 248 pages

File Size : 36,76 MB

Release : 2003

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN :

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Book Description

Since capital punishment was such a hotly debated issue in Europe during the early nineteenth century, and since crime, trials, and executions provided ideal material for the melodrama that characterizes French Romanticism, several authors of the period naturally exploited the death penalty in their works. Severed Heads and Martyred Souls examines the Romantics' obsession with capital punishment, analyzing its literary treatment in texts by Hugo, Lamartine, Eugene Sue, Dumas the elder, Vigny, Balzac, Stendhal, and Nodier. The book explores the effects of death sentences on character and plot development, the language of the texts, and the overt or implicit moral and political messages of each author, and successfully demonstrates that reflecting upon the French Romantics' treatment of capital punishment is both important to understanding the Romantic movement, and instructive for current debate on the issue of capital punishment.



Losing Our Heads

Author : Regina Janes

Publisher : NYU Press

Page : 272 pages

File Size : 41,38 MB

Release : 2005-08

Category : Family & Relationships

ISBN : 0814742696

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Book Description

What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished—but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared—and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more “barbaric”or “primitive” past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity’s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.



Magic and Divination in the Ancient World

Author : Leda Jean Ciraolo

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 174 pages

File Size : 10,96 MB

Release : 2002-01-01

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 9789004124066

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Book Description

This collection of essays focuses on divination across the Ancient World from early Mesopotamia to late antiquity. The authors deal with the forms, theory and poetics of this important and still poorly understood ancient phenomenon.